View MS Excel Spreadsheets for Free: MS Excel Viewer

Small and Medium businesses have to be run smartly to ensure that they leverage technology to its maximum extent, such that they become operationally smooth and efficient. SMEs need to use technology to ensure optimum utilization of financial resources. For Small and Medium Enterprises, innovation is the name of the game and if as a business you are not upto it, then you surely have lots of catching up to do. SMEs require solutions which solve their very many needs, while being cost effective and within their operational budgets. 

SMEs and Technology

While many small and emerging businesses are waking up to the fact that they need effective use of technology at all times for being smart operationally, technology makers and vendors are coming up with innovative solutions, some of them free which are helping SMEs solve pending business challenges.

Let Excel Viewer work for you

While Microsoft Excel is an important office productivity software, it also makes it challenging for smaller businesses to buy costly licences to the MS Office productivity suite. Buying licenses for every team member becomes a challenge which obviously needs a solution. And who better than Microsoft coming up and providing a solution to the challenge.

While you cannot edit, but MS Excel Viewer, allows you to view, print and copy excel spreadsheets, even if you don't have MS Excel installed. The Excel Viewer, together with the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats, allows you open excel spreadsheets saved in the following formats:

• Microsoft Excel 2010
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2003
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2000
• Microsoft Excel 97

How do I get the Excel Viewer?

You can simply download the Word Viewer from the official source of the Microsoft website. Once you start downloading the software onto your local machine, follow the below listed instructions:

1. Download the file by clicking the Download button (above) and saving the file to your hard disk.
2. Double-click the wdviewer.exe program file on your hard disk to start the Setup program.
3. Follow the instructions on the screen to complete the installation.
4. Install the Compatibility Pack.

Once you have the Compatibility pack downloaded and installed on your local machine (laptop/ desktop) use the following instructions to learn how to use the software:

1. On the File menu, click Open.
2. In the Look in list, click the drive, folder, or Internet location that contains the file you want to open.
3. In the folder list, locate the file, or locate and open the folder that contains the file.
4. Click the file, and then click Open.

One you are downloading the file from Microsoft's website, it re-directs you to the information page, where, it gives you all the information related to the software and the various instructions of its usage, which you can copy and past on a notepad in your local machine.

How does this software help my business?

While it does not allows you to edit and create spreadsheets, MS Excel Viewer allows you to view, print and copy the spreadsheets, which is important in the manner that, small companies which cannot afford the licensed version of the MS office, can go buy a single license, and use the viewer on the other systems which require only being a dumb machine and are connected to the server to fetch any information. Its more a networked solution, which works best for SMEs.

There are many such tools available online, which are benefiting the Small and Medium Enterprise segment. To know more, get in touch with the experts at IndiaMART Knowledge Services. Do drop in a comment to this post to let us know what else would you want us to share about!